Au Revoir Simone is a feminine electro-pop group from Brooklyn with an ethereal look & feel. This is one of the tracks from their The Bird of Music album.Their press sheet said, “The Bird of Music is an album steeped in hazy dreams, thoroughbred horses, soft winter snows, dusty rays of sunlight and lovelorn wishes. It is a record of dichotomies, carefully marrying cold beats with warm voices, joy and sadness, the human and the machine.” Website here.
sleeping with the meteorologist
I’ve been thinking
imbibing those nascent things
in a pantheon of doom
suffused with light.
I’ve been missing
the one with the tattoo,
full of grunge,
and humor, and darkness,
inside my vertiginous eye.
I’ve been sleeping
with the meteorologist,
whose predictions are an assemblage
of signs, from God,
who’s everywhere,
in the crevices of light & darkness,
in the falsehood of ceilings.
Process notes: The image prompt from We Write Poems is an iteration series by Fred Muram. It’s full of surrealistic suggestions, and mine is only one suggestion, against so many other probabilities/possibilities. You can read the others over at We Write Poems on Wednesday.
O lord I’m getting ready to believe
Michael Kiwanuka was included in the BBC’s Sound of 2012 poll and was named as the winner on 6 January 2012 (according to Wikipedia).
dreaming in space
Twilight splashes the last sunburst
on the shining roofs. I sit here,
braiding words, an act of grace.
It’s what this place means,
quietly translating the morass
of personal history,
a memoir going viral.
When I write, sometimes
it’s of no consequence whether
it’s about ragged lettuce,
colas & burgers, objects with shape
and vapor, as long as I take them out
from a manila envelope.
Real objects act as sidebars
to the story I am writing,
logs to make into tables
& chairs. There, the glint of trophies,
the lacy tablecloth,
the sheaf of papers,
the tumble of cushions.
They’re all inside this
crucible, as if there’s a God
of all things, as synthetic
& as real, as inane & as lofty,
as easy & as difficult,
patiently transgressing objects in space
to find the seal, a torch,
a centre of gravity.
Process notes: Margo challenges us to write about place in poetry. She talks about baseline landscapes, perhaps the primal landscape of your childhood. I feel though, my present space is my primal landscape. It most defines how I live, and the writing I do.
And here’s a great interview video about space & meaning.
The greatest thing is when someone says they come into a room and they have this incredible feeling. Whatever it is, I say the word feeling that way, because it can be so many different things. I think there’s something inspiring about connecting to someone’s subconscious.– Principal designer, Robin Standefer
Together with architect Stephen Alesch, she talked about the importance of harmonizing textures, combining interesting objects together in unexpected ways. Ultimately it’s about the way we interact with space and objects to have a dream-like moment.
a blue bird takes to the air
The black cloud floating away
as we pried open
our oval capsules.
We’ve been fluttering in
small circles, is it time we leap,
gossamers of air?
As we listened to the blue
bird on the windowsill, we began
to shun the dull & boring.
What you’re singing
makes me feel as if I need to be
something beautiful.
It makes me lithe,
my gummy feathers fluffing up,
like some titular thing.
And we’re off, tasting the air’s
voodoo chill. The owl says,
we’re full of capriciousness.
The lissome air becomes a draft,
a soaring aspiration,
the love of song.
keepsakes like a breath
My mother wore jade,
heaven made,
with no twist in fate
to unbend her, except heavenward,
life so sweet, if unmade.
I stared at the lilies
so pink, stayed in
the present tense, rumble
in the music,
in some chronological
sense, because it took as long
to figure out.
That time isn’t meant to
be one long string
tied to your ear,
it bends, it gets into
terrible knots,
creating sensations
like strings,
like music.
That gold glitters on
my sister’s neck,
linking her back to
a heart of diamonds
so sweet, my father’s
little keepsakes.
Process notes: Gautami’s prompt for We write poems is to write about keepsakes, apart from material things. She writes, “I wrote a poem out of nothing and everything. We hoard keepsakes of material things apart from our memories. And I tried to create a poem from that memory, keeping out material things.” We surround ourselves with these keepsakes, often in material forms. The irony, of course, is that the invisible is real, the visible is not, but often we behave as if the opposite holds the truth.
I try to imagine the new moon
The air, a washed pale blue.
The boat, powered by two oars.
The lopsidedness as you swung
left and right.
I try to imagine the new moon.
Before breakfast, my son made
seafood pasta, and somewhere
between the taste of scallops
& fusilli, the air was hinged
with a door & a gorgeous double
rainbow, against the blue.
Somewhere, a bird,
a different sky, a boat
of unconditional love.
enters the dragon
Happy happy new year of the water dragon! May good fortune smile on you the whole year through!
the colossus
It is uncanny, but we could hardly
suppress the story
inside us, scalded in a whirlpool
of instincts, focusing
like the eye of a storm,
where lies the charm.
From the ashen statue,
in the irrevocable hymn
of retrieving, in a bout
of levitating in consciousness
for an anchor,
the story whispered.
We’re both crushed by our urges,
and saved by them,
like finding a lost sister,
piecing & fitting
shard by scattered shard,
till we’re whole.
the lullaby
I’ve got the darkness stamped in
the light, a fossil leaf
in a book,
a one way ticket, a fractious
deed.
Could it be youth who stared
down darkness
in an empty street,
underrated,
without a view?
There’s always a slogan for balancing
one against the other,
so here comes the ornate, sacred
love of enigmatic skin,
and then transcending all that
on a yoga mat.
Slowly the lullaby rises
in your throat, and you, my love,
holding out your porcelain cup
for a nice poached egg.
